Course Assignment and Scheduling in Academic Year; Summer Session

UH Hilo Policy on Course Assignment and Scheduling. These are done by department chairs, in consultation with departmental faculty, division chairs, college directors, and the dean or his/her designee. In determining which classes should be offered, chairs balance the need for General Education courses, service courses, and major courses with faculty expertise. While faculty class time preference is taken into account, chairs and deans must make the most efficient use of limited resources, including ensuring that courses are offered in a variety of time slots to accommodate a wide range of students.

UH Hilo Policy on Enrollment Caps/Enrollment Management.The size of classes is determined by a combination of student demand, course content, UH system regulation, and room size.

Implementation

Each Department Chair assembles a Course Schedule request, in consultation with the faculty of their department. The Schedule Request must include, in order of priority, GE offerings, major area requirements, and, electives (if possible). The schedule request is submitted by the Department Chair to their Division Chair, in CAS, or directly to their Dean (all other colleges). All Deans (except CoP) submit their schedule requests to the CAS Dean’s office for integration of all college schedules.

The CAS Dean’s Office (the Associate Dean and Secretary) will construct a university wide course schedule. The requested schedules will be accommodated if possible within the bounds of room availability, room capacity compared with historical enrollment, ADA accommodation, and the most efficient use of very limited resources.

When determining which courses to offer in a given semester, it is important for Chairs to consult historical enrollment to ensure that low enrolled courses are not scheduled more than can be justified by enrollment patterns keeping in mind that classes must achieve a minimum of 10 students enrolled or be canceled.

Following UH system policy, each class offered through UH Hilo must enroll at least 10 students each semester except in special cases such as internships and directed readings. Classes that fail to enroll at least 10 students will be canceled, with the instructor reassigned to a course with higher demand. Exceptions can be recommended by the dean of the college for exceptional circumstances but these recommendations will be vetted by the UH System Vice-President each semester. When a full-time faculty member's class is canceled and a lecturer is employed in the department, the lecturer is generally relieved of responsibility and the faculty member reassigned to that course.

When student demand exceeds the capacity of scheduled classes to meet demand, and when resources are available, Deans may ask departments to add additional sections to be taught by lecturers. When resources are not available and demand is extraordinary, the Dean will consult with departments to raise course caps. After consultation with department chairs (and division chairs in units that have division chairs) in an effort to reach consensus, the final decision as to course caps rests with the Dean.

Special Room Requirements

Faculty teaching in larger rooms should expect to teach larger enrollments, and faculty may be expected to teach early in the morning and during the evening. Faculty teaching Writing Intensive courses, which require smaller enrollment, should expect to teach in smaller rooms.

Most classrooms offer multimedia capability; a few classrooms offer PCs for each student. Faculty Lists of the university’s lists of teaching PC labs, multimedia instructional classrooms, open PC labs, student resource centers can be found at Academic Computing Services.

Faculty may request these and other specially equipped classrooms when courses are being scheduled for the following semester. There may not be enough specially equipped rooms to meet the needs of all requests so conflicts will be resolved on first come, first served basis. For information on opportunities to teach online or to use multi-media or computer facilities for teaching, see Instructional Technology and Online Teaching Resources in the Teaching Resources section of this handbook.

Updated May 2013 by MJM.

Summer Session

The UH Hilo Summer Session offers college credit courses. It is divided into two sessions: Summer Session I, which begins on one week after Spring commencement and runs for four weeks; and Summer Session II, which begins immediately after Summer Session I in mid-June and runs for six weeks.

Each November, UH Hilo faculty and departments are invited to propose courses for the following summer. Conditions of employment are distributed along with invitations. The summer session catalog appears in early Spring, and registration begins the first week of April.